A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

- Paul Valery

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

- Paul Valery

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

- Paul Valery

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

- Paul Valery

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

- Paul Valery

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

- Paul Valery

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

- Paul Valery

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

- Paul Valery

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

- Paul Valery

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

- Paul Valery

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

- Paul Valery

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

- Paul Valery

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

- Paul Valery

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

- Paul Valery

Politeness is organized indifference.

- Paul Valery

Power without abuse loses its charm.

- Paul Valery

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.

- Paul Valery

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

- Paul Valery

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

- Paul Valery

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

- Paul Valery